Adult Raters Research Articles

Self- and social perception of physical appearance in chest wall deformity

This study analyzes self- and social perception of physical appearance in patients with chest wall deformity (CWD), including both pectus carinatum and pectus excavatum. Self-perception of appearance in 76 patients with CWD and social perception of patients’ appearance by 20 adult and 20 adolescent raters was assessed using the Appearance Rating Scale (Stangier et al., 2000) and evaluated for agreement and multivariate correlates. Results indicate no agreement between self- and social rating. Based on mean scores patients rated their appearance significantly more negatively than adult raters but only slightly different than adolescent raters. Adolescent raters’ judgment of the patients’ appearance was related to CWD characteristics, while self-rating rather seems to be related to psychosocial factors. Because adolescents are a relevant peer group for adolescent patients with CWD their evaluation of the appearance might influence patients’ self-image and might affect their psychological functioning. Effective interventions focusing on social interactions are needed.

The messages they send: e‐mail use by adolescents with and without a history of specific language impairment (SLI)

Contemporary adolescents use e-mail for a variety of purposes, including peer communication and education. Research into these uses has focused on typically developing individuals; much less is known about the use of e-mail by exceptional youth. The present study examined the structure and form of e-mail messages sent by adolescents with and without a history of specific language impairment (SLI). Thirty-eight adolescents with a history of SLI and 56 typically developing (TD) peers were assessed on measures of nonverbal abilities, core language skills and literacy skills (reading and spelling). The participants were asked to compose an e-mail reply to a standard e-mail sent by an experimenter. These reply e-mails were coded for linguistic structure, readability and spelling errors. Two adult raters, blind to the participants' language ability, judged how understandable the e-mails were, how grammatically correct the e-mails were, and also the sender's command of the English language. Adolescents with a history of SLI produced e-mails that were similar to those sent by their TD peers in terms of structure and readability. However, they made significantly more spelling errors. Furthermore, the adult raters considered the messages from participants with a history of SLI to be of poorer standard than those sent by their TD peers. The findings suggest that the e-mail messages of adolescents with a history of SLI provide indicators of the sender's language and literacy skills. Implications for intervention and technology development are discussed.

The NIMH Child Emotional Faces Picture Set (NIMH‐ChEFS): a new set of children's facial emotion stimuli

With the emergence of new technologies, there has been an explosion of basic and clinical research on the affective and cognitive neuroscience of face processing and emotion perception. Adult emotional face stimuli are commonly used in these studies. For developmental research, there is a need for a validated set of child emotional faces. This paper describes the development of the National Institute of Mental Health Child Emotional Faces Picture Set (NIMH-ChEFS), a relatively large stimulus set with high quality, color images of the emotional faces of children. The set includes 482 photographs of fearful, angry, happy, sad and neutral child faces with two gaze conditions: direct and averted gaze. In this paper we describe the development of the NIMH-ChEFS and data on the set's validity based on ratings by 20 healthy adult raters. Agreement between the a priori emotion designation and the raters' labels was high and comparable with values reported for commonly used adult picture sets. Intensity, representativeness, and composite "goodness" ratings are also presented to guide researchers in their choice of specific stimuli for their studies. These data should give researchers confidence in the NIMH-ChEFS's validity for use in affective and social neuroscience research.

Intra-Rater and Inter-Rater Reliability of the Balance Error Scoring System in Pre-Adolescent School Children

This study was designed to test the intra- and inter-rater reliability of the University of North Carolina's Balance Error Scoring System in 9- and 10-year-old children. Additionally, a modified version of the Balance Error Scoring System was tested to determine if it was more sensitive in this population (“raw scores”). Forty-six normally developing fourth-grade students underwent balance testing. Twelve trials measured static and dynamic balance. Four adult raters scored the balance tests to yield Cronbach's alpha scores of reliability. Intra-rater University of North Carolina Balance Error Scoring System α varied from .73 to .94 and .94 to .99 when using the raw scores. The inter-rater University of North Carolina Balance Error Scoring System α of the four raters ranged from .77 to .95 and from .88 to .98 when using the raw scores. The University of North Carolina Balance Error Scoring System shows high reliability when used with fourth-grade elementary school children; however, raw scores may show greater reliability in a population of children.

Adults' ability to detect children's lying

Adults are poor deception detectors when examining lies told by adults, on average. However, there are some adults who are better at detecting lies than others. Children learn to lie at a very young age, a behavior that is socialized by parents. Yet, less is known about the ability to detect children's lies, particularly with regard to individual differences in the ability to detect this deception. The current study explored adult raters' ability to discern honesty in children who lied or told the truth about committing a misdeed. Results showed that adults are no better at detecting children's lies than they are with adult lies. In particular, adults were very poor at identifying children's honest statements. However, individual differences did emerge, suggesting that the ability to detect lying in children might be facilitated by relevant experience working with children. Implications for legal and mental health contexts are discussed.

Work-Related Skills Awareness in High-School Students with Diabilities

This study investigated the work-related skills awareness levels of high school students with disabilities by comparing expert ratings and student self-report ratings. This issue is considered important because (a) evidence indicates that lack of awareness is associated with poor employment outcomes and (b) young persons with disabilities are known to experience employment difficulties. Substantial deficits in awareness were found, with the majority of students overestimating their abilities, as hypothesized. In addition, students perceived by adult raters as having greater employability assets tended to be more accurate in their work-related skills awareness. Suggestions for interventions and future research needed in this area are included.

Informant Agreement in Behavior Ratings for Children with Epilepsy

The purpose of this study was to determine the degree of informant agreement for behavioral ratings of children with epilepsy. Informants completed Achenbach's 1991 scales: parents completed the Child Behavior Checklist (CBCL), teachers completed the Teacher's Report Form (TRF), and youth completed the Youth Self-Report Form of the CBCL (YSR). Analyses included degree of concordance of ratings as a function of informant, child gender, and condition severity (active vs inactive epilepsy). Results indicated that across all four types of raters (mothers, fathers, teachers, and adolescents) there was a similar pattern. Mothers' ratings tended to be the highest and youths' ratings tended to be the lowest across scales. In general, agreement among adult raters was greater than between youth and adults. Mothers and teachers reported more internalizing symptoms than did youth; mother, father, and teacher ratings on externalizing symptoms were not significantly different from each other. There were no significant effects of gender and condition severity on concordance among ratings although there were some interesting trends.

Distinctive messages in infant-directed lullabies and play songs.

Mothers were recorded singing a song of their choice in both a lullaby style and a play-song style to their 6-month-olds. Adult raters identified the play-song-style and lullaby-style versions with 100% accuracy. Play-song-style renditions were rated as being more brilliant, clipped, and rhythmic and as having more smiling and more prominent consonants. Lullaby-style renditions were characterized as being more airy, smooth, and soothing. Adults observed videotapes (without sound) of 6-month-olds listening to alternating lullaby-style and play-song-style trials and performed at above chance levels when determining which music the infants were hearing. Coding analyses revealed that infants focused their attention more toward themselves during lullaby-style trials and more toward the external world during play-song-style trials. These results suggest that singing may be used to regulate infants' states and to communicate emotional information.

569 Human neonate's reactions to natural olfactory stimuli

Responses of awake and asleep 3-day-old human neonates were recorded to the presentation of artificial (vanillin, butyric acid, formula milks) and biological (breast milk, amniotic fluid) odorants matched on subjective intensity and trigeminal dimensions. The responses included behavioral (facial and oral movements) and autonomic (respiration, differential skin temperature) measures. The neonates reacted with significant facial and respiratory changes to low concentrations of olfactory stimuli during the various behavioral states. The analysis of olfacto-facial configurations revealed that behavioral markers of disgust (nose wrinkling, upper lip raising) discriminated between some odors judged as being pleasant and unpleasant by adult raters (vanillin vs. butyric acid). However, although some early predisposition to process the affective significance of stimuli may be suggested, no convincing evidence was obtained that neonates discriminated the hedonic valence of odors within the same perceptual space as adults. Finally, neonates evinced a differential pattern of respiratory responding to the presentation of milk odors according to the mode of feeding (breast vs. bottle feeding), suggesting that early olfactory discrimination may be mediated by stimuli with high ecological salience.

Representational gestures in Developmental Coordination Disorder and specific language impairment: Error-types and the reliability of ratings

Gesture production was studied in children with developmental coordination disorder (DCD) and specific language impairment (SLI) in comparison to normally developing age-matched and younger control children. The pattern of error production was investigated to characterize the praxis skills seen in these two developmental disorders as well as to inform understanding of the aetiology of both DCD and SLI. Given the subjective nature of the categorization of errors, a separate study was conducted to investigate inter-rater reliability. Independent adult raters consistently used four out of fourteen error-types and for these four, inter-rater reliability was found to be good. The type of errors made by children with DCD, SLI and the younger controls were very similar. The only difference between the groups was in the frequency with which errors were displayed, suggesting that the performance of the clinical children might be an indicator of immature praxis development. It is suggested that the inclusion of a younger control (similar to a “motor match”) group is an important methodological device for investigating the underlying nature of disorders such as DCD and SLI. PsycINFO classification: 3250; 3270

Children's internet searching on complex problems: Performance and process analyses

The research reported here examined the effects of task structure on elementary school students' information seeking on the Internet. Thirty-two 5th- and 6th-grade students searched on 2 tasks (1 well-defined and 1 ill-defined) for information that was relevant to solving 2 problems. Information-seeking process behaviors were analyzed by collecting computer trace data of each students search. Information-seeking performance was measured by 2 adult raters and by students' own judgments of all documents found. Analyses of students' process behaviors illustrated that children are interactive information seekers, preferring to browse rather than plan or employ systematic analytic-based searching strategies. Performance results indicated that children have difficulty finding relevant information on the Internet, however, children did search more effectively on the ill-defined task than on the well-defined one. Further, when judging their own performance, students rated their work equally on both tasks, yet adult judges found that students performed significantly worse on the well-defined task. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Newborn infants prefer attractive faces

Several previous experiments have found that infants 2 months of age and older will spend more time looking at attractive faces when these are shown paired with faces judged by adults to be unattractive. Two experiments are described whose aim was to find whether the “attractiveness effect” is present soon after birth. In both, pairings of attractive and unattractive female faces (as judged by adult raters) were shown to newborn infants (in the age range 14–151 hours from birth), and in both the infants looked longer at the attractive faces. These findings can be interpreted either in terms of an innate perceptual mechanism that detects and responds specifically to faces, or in terms of rapid learning about faces soon after birth.

Facial and Autonomic Responses to Biological and Artificial Olfactory Stimuli in Human Neonates: Re-Examining Early Hedonic Discrimination of Odors

Responses of awake and asleep 3-day-old human neonates were recorded to the presentation of artificial (vanillin, butyric acid, formula milks) and biological (breast milk, amniotic fluid) odorants matched on subjective intensity and trigeminal dimensions. The responses included behavioral (facial and oral movements) and autonomic (respiration, differential skin temperature) measures. The neonates reacted with significant facial and respiratory changes to low concentrations of olfactory stimuli during the various behavioral states. The analysis of olfacto-facial configurations revealed that behavioral markers of disgust (nose wrinkling, upper lip raising) discriminated between some odors judged as being pleasant and unpleasant by adult raters (vanillin vs. butyric acid). However, although some early predisposition to process the affective significance of stimuli may be suggested, no convincing evidence was obtained that neonates discriminated the hedonic valence of odors within the same perceptual space as adults. Finally, neonates evinced a differential pattern of respiratory responding to the presentation of milk odors according to the mode of feeding (breast vs. bottle feeding), suggesting that early olfactory discrimination may be mediated by stimuli with high ecological salience.

Infant preferences for infant-directed versus noninfant-directed playsongs and lullabies

Each of 15 mothers was recorded singing a song of her choice to her 4- to 7-month-old and singing the same song alone. Adult raters were very accurate at distinguishing infant-directed from infant-absent versions, and the former were independently rated as more loving than the latter. Most of the songs were consistently classified as either playsongs or lullabies. The infant-directed playsongs were rated as relatively more rhythmic than the infant-directed lullabies, in comparison to the infant-absent versions. These results suggest that playsongs and lullabies may be distinct and used to communicate different information. Infant preferences were tested for three playsong and three lullaby pairs in a preferential looking paradigm. Infants preferred the infant-directed over infant-absent versions for five of the six pairs. Furthermore, the degree of preference was correlated with the adult ratings of loving tone of voice. The results indicate that mothers modify their singing in the presence of their infants, that infants attend to these changes, that playsongs and lullabies are likely distinct musical styles differing in their rhythmic quality, and that what adults perceive to be a loving tone of voice is highly salient to infants.

ANALYSIS OF PROPOSED REVISIONS OF THE TEST OF SPOKEN ENGLISH

ABSTRACTThis research was conducted to compare a prototype revised form of the Test of Spoken English (TSE®) with the current version of the same test. The study compared interrater reliability, frequency of rater discrepancy at all score levels, component task adequacy, scoring efficacy, and other concurrent and construct validity evidence, including oral proficiency interview correlations for a subset of the examinee sample. The study employed a representative examinee sample of 342 nonnative speakers of English, purposely sampled from among the two professional domains of prospective university teaching assistants (N = 184) and prospective licensed medical professionals (N = 158).One somewhat unusual component of the study was the attempt to involve persons most at risk in the judgment process. Thus, in addition to employing the usual group of trained raters for the scoring of the current and prototype versions of the test, 16 naive adult raters were purposely selected (eight first‐year university students from four broad academic disciplines and eight nondegreed prospective medical outpatients within four broad age levels) for having limited exposure to foreign languages and cultures. These 16 naive raters (eight females and eight males) provided concurrent judgments of the comprehensibility and communicative effectiveness of a subset of 40 recorded prototype examinations.In general, the comparative evidence gathered appeared to underscore the psychometric quality of the prototype revised TSE and to support conclusions of its adequacy as an instrument used to make judgments of the oral English language proficiency of nonnative speakers in the targeted populations. Some additional suggestions are provided on ways to implement the scoring of the prototype version of the test.

Children's credibility on camera: the influence of age and production factors

SUMMARY. An experiment was conducted to examine whether the use of different camera shots‐medium or close‐up‐affected the way in which child witnesses were perceived by adult raters. School children were video‐recorded describing an event in which they had participated, and students rated the children s perceived credibility on a number of scales. Type of shot used did not influence perceived credibility in a consistent manner, although it did influence some aspects of a child's credibility when the child's age and/or sex was taken into account. Children seen in medium shot were judged more honest than children seen in close‐up. Age of the child was the most influential factor, with older children generally perceived as more credible than younger children; this effect was particularly noticeable for girls and children seen in medium shot. The relevance of the current study for the testimony of child witnesses is discussed in the light of current and proposed legal reforms.

Adults' perceptions of children's videotaped truthful and deceptive statements

SUMMARY. This article uses a research study on decisions about children's truth telling to discuss the difficult issues involved in using video‐taped evidence in child abuse cases. The adult raters had to decide whether each child recounting a school trip was telling the truth or had only seen a video recording of the day's events. Raters were just above chance in detecting truth and deception, were better able to detect truth tellers than deceivers, and were more successful in decoding deceptive behaviour presented by boys and younger children. Most accuracy‐confidence relationships were not significant.

Four Perspectives on the Competence and Self-Esteem of Emotionally Disturbed Children beginning Day Treatment

Competence and self-esteem ratings of 34 children beginning day treatment were compared with ratings by their parents, psychotherapists, and teachers. Children's scores were the highest and teachers' were the lowest. Adult raters' scores showed a strong trend or a significant difference on almost all subscales. There were no differences between adult rater pairs. The adults' views present a close approximation of the children's reality; the children's views represent a defense of this reality. The results are discussed in terms of the amount of communication among rater groups, the role each adult rater has with the child, and the implications regarding treatment.

Aesthetic perception of faces during infancy*

This study explores the visual preferences of young infants for faces that differ with respect to their perceived attractiveness, as evaluated by adult raters. Black‐and‐white slides were presented to infants in 12 paired comparisons. Both 3‐month‐old (n = 26) and 6‐month‐old (n = 35) infants looked longer at the faces rated attractive. Pairs were constructed so that members of each pair were as similar as possible in gross physical appearance, differing only in rated attractiveness. The implications of an aesthetic sensitivity in such young infants are briefly explored.

Children's standards for judging their own facial expressions of emotion

This study examined three- to seven-year-old children's abilities to recognize and label their own facial expressions of emotion. Each child posed four facial expressions (Happy, Sad, Angry, and Scared) which were photographed with a Polaroid camera. The child then selected each expression from the array of his/her own photos and labeled the facial expression of each photo. In addition to children's self-evaluations, the photo set's expressive content was evaluated by a panel of adult raters. Happy was the expression easiest for children to pose; Scared was the most difficult. Abilities involved in evaluating one's own facial expression (i.e., recognizing and labeling) appear not to be acquired simultaneously with the ability to pose the expression. Not all children conformed to adult standards in evaluating their own expressions. Nearly one-fifth of the children studied exhibited evidence of an idiosyncratic expressive scheme for at least one of their facial expressions.